The Gatekeepers: A Documentary

Saw the Israeli documentary, The Gatekeepers, finally. Had
put off doing so because I thought I knew what to expect. But the movie was
better, richer, than expected.

My views have long since been that Israel's occupation of
the West Bank is not just bad for the occupied but also for the occupiers. How
nice, but how facile, for me, in the United States, to hold to such a fine and
principled conclusion. It's another thing entirely when four pillars of the
Israeli defense establishment, four ex-chiefs of the Shin Bet, Israel's major
security organization, affirm the same thing, as they do, in this film.

All four have bloody hands, all have done what they felt
necessary to protect Israeli lives. Israel is their country. It isn't mine. I'm
not an Israeli patriot. I'm an American Jew. These men had to make dire
decisions about how to stop terrorists from planting bombs on buses in Tel
Aviv, for instance, with horrific results the camera neither flees from nor
dwells upon. In one case these men had to decide how to neutralize, if that is
the proper euphemism — not that the interviewees resort to euphemisms — a
bomb-making genius under cover in Gaza. In one attempt to get at this engineer
of havoc, innocents, including children, were killed. There had been faulty
intelligence, and too much ordinance. In another attempt, there had been too
little ordinance and the savant escaped.

The movie is full of a sense of history. It brings you back
to the great gasp of hope occasioned by the Oslo Accords — that unforeseen
handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat. As per those accords, Rabin
acknowledged the right of the Palestinian people to a state of their own. This
was an entirely new avowal to come from an Israeli leader. Arafat, at least
formally, foreswore terrorism, an equally original idea for a Palestinian movement
that had seemed bereft of any other thought.

Rabin is seen by these masters of Israeli security as the
exemplary figure, and is mourned as such by the retired elders of the Shin Bet.
Rabin was the prime minister who pledged to pursue the peace process as if
there were no terrorism, and to combat terrorism as if there were no peace
process. It's bracing to recall that at the time there was an active, plausible
peace process, as distinct from the increasingly wistful and forlorn references
to such now.

Ruminating on his career, one of the principles interviewed
in this film, says: "The Palestinians wanted a state. We gave them
settlements. We wanted security. They gave us terrorism."

That anti-peace dialectic continues.

For me, the most memorable, most frightening, parts of the
film have to do not with the bus bombings or other results of terror, but with
the massive, crazed Israeli demonstrations against Rabin, equating him with
Hitler, for coming to an accord with Arafat. Israel has genuine enemies
without, to be sure. But The Gatekeepers leaves the impression that it has no
less mortal an enemy within, a rabbinic establishment that furnished Yigal
Amir, Rabin's assassin — and therefore, it can be argued, the chief assassin of
the peace process — with his certainties and his ideas.